Einstein's Blunder and the Cosmologists' Conundrum
In the early 1900’s, Albert Einstein gave us the theory of General Relativity. When Einstein conceived it, he was hesitant about it’s accuracy because there were certain aspects of our observable universe that didn’t fit with it. In short, his initial assumptions predicted that many of the clusters of massive objects observed in the galaxy should have collapsed into black holes. They haven’t, so he knew his theory was missing something. A few decades later we found out what it was: the universe is expanding.
This he called his greatest blunder.
Perhaps Einstein was just being too hard on himself. As blunders go, not having all the answers doesn’t really count. If it did, we’d all be guilty of it. And in the grand scheme, he had a lot of the right answers. Including knowing how important it is to know what you don’t know, and what you cannot know, and that you should be honest about it when telling others about theories you may have. Those are priceless traits to have anywhere, not just science.
Unfortunately, those traits haven’t been strong in science since The Big Bang replaced the other theories that were based on an eternal universe like Steady State. That caused a profound change in science. All of a sudden the universe had a beginning. It seemed to just spring forth from literally nothing. And the physicists and the cosmologists had a conundrum. The scientific observations we’ve gathered from looking at our universe are in alignment with what the Bible has said all along.
In the beginning…
Oh the weight of that statement on them must be immense. If the cosmologists and physicists confirm vocally that science affirms the biblical account of God’s creation, they render themselves obsolete to a good portion of the population. The power, the prestige, the positions, the paycheck, all of it would be in danger of fading away. After all, why should the population worry about, let alone pay millions of dollars for, in-depth answers when Genesis tells them all they need to know? This is one reason we’re graced with titles like The God Delusion.
So in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, those cosmologists and physicists have produced a wild array of alternate theories to explain away the obvious. Some go before the Big Bang, some side step it entirely. All of which can be broken down into three main types:
In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded: Lawrence Krauss and Alan Guth have adopted this view, but by nothing they mean the quantum fields. How just renaming something to nothing solves the problem escapes anyone who has thought deeply about it. David Albert gives a scathing review in the NY Times about that very point.
In the beginning, there were many beginnings, which caused the beginning: Stephen Hawking theorized that time is not solely linear, it also had a vertical, “imaginary” element (his term, not mine), which made it like the Cartesian Plane. In his theory, the universe existed in non-material possibilities in imaginary time until somehow imaginary time began to move real time. How exactly the possibilities in imaginary time could exert real force on real time to get it to move and progress as it does today is a mystery.
In the beginning, something eternal and outside our universe (that cannot be God), started our universe: Richard Dawkins and many others push the multiverse theories where many other universes exist and somehow one or more happen to seed ours with matter and energy, either by tunneling in and depositing directly or by bumping up against our universe’s “bubble.” Other scientists propose massive energy fields that eternally create universes in a Landscape. There is no evidence for any of this, nor are there any viable mechanisms for the transfer of matter and energy between anything from outside our universe, if there’s anything out there at all. It’s all philosophical arguments tried very hard to be passed off as science.
These men, and many others working in science, have arbitrarily thrown God out of the equation, and many have declared that He does not exist solely on the basis that they do not want Him to. Science says nothing on the subject. It cannot say anything on the subject. Maybe in 100 or 500 years we’ll learn enough to draw a valid conclusion. For now, all we have is a bunch of people who don’t know, claiming to know what they cannot know, and not being honest about it.
Hopefully that will soon change for the better, but for now we need to be on the lookout and remember to think critically about it all.
